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Overeating During Pregnancy Predicts a Lifetime of Obesity for Children

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Overeating During Pregnancy Predicts a Lifetime of Obesity for Children

Written by Rachel Barclay
| Published on October 1, 2013

If a mother puts on too much weight during pregnancy, it increases the chances that her child will be overweight at age 12, new research shows.

Medicine has long focused on the effects of malnutrition during
pregnancy. Expectant mothers are encouraged to take vitamin supplements
to ensure that their child receives all the crucial nutrients they need.
But with America’s rising obesity epidemic, it's time to examine the
effects of another, seemingly unrelated problem: overnutrition.

To learn more, Dr. David Ludwig at the Boston Children’s Hospital partnered with Dr. Heather Rouse from the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement and Dr. Janet Currie
at Princeton University. They used a set of data gathered in Arkansas
that included 42,133 women and their 91,045 children. The team matched
hospital records of women’s weight gain during pregnancy with body mass
index (BMI) data gathered from their children years later.

By
examining women with more than one child and comparing the siblings’
outcomes, they were able to control for both genetics and upbringing.
The researchers speculated that two children with the same parents,
growing up in the same home and eating the same food, might have
different risks for obesity based on how much weight their mother gained
during each pregnancy.

Feed the Mother, Feed the Child

The
study results confirmed what Ludwig had already seen in animal studies:
a mother’s overnutrition during pregnancy made her children more likely
to be overweight or obese as middle-schoolers, independent of genetics
and diet.

“This distinction is important,” explained Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children's Hospital,
in an interview with Healthline. “If maternal overnutrition has an
independent effect on childhood body weight, the implications would be
major: obesity could accelerate through successive generations, unless
this vicious cycle is interrupted.”

When an expectant mother
overeats, her bloodstream becomes saturated with surplus calories, which
reach her child along with all the nutrients the child needs. Although
the exact mechanism is still unknown, nine months of exposure to an
overly-rich diet programs the child's body to retain calories as an
adult, making him or her more likely to be overweight.

Ludwig
thinks this might be one factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.
“We found that pregnancy weight gain was strongly associated with
childhood BMI,” he said. “The child of a woman with high pregnancy
weight gain had an eight percent increased risk of obesity at an average
age of 12 years. Though relatively small on an individual basis, the
effects we found could explain several hundred thousand cases of
childhood obesity globally each year.”

Short-Term Sacrifice, Long-Term Gain

This
finding offers hope for overweight mothers-to-be who want to do
everything they can to protect their children from obesity. Due to a
number of metabolic and hormonal factors, losing weight and keeping it
off can be difficult for many women, especially over the course of
years. However, Ludwig’s research means that simply trying to maintain
weight control for the duration of your pregnancy could have a lifelong
protective effect on your child.

“Weight management can be
difficult for many people over the long-term,” Ludwig explained. “This
study suggests that avoiding excessive weight gain during pregnancy—just
9 months—can have long-term benefits for the next generation. Since
pregnant women are often especially motivated to make behavioral changes
for the benefit of their child, these findings suggest that the best
time to begin childhood obesity prevention is prior to birth.”

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